Strand 3: Teaching grammar

The mistake the innovators have made
is to assume that a conscious understanding of grammar is a
prerequisite to acquiring communicative competence. That such an
understanding might be helpful in some situations for some students
is not in question – that it is a prerequisite for all students is
patently false.(Krashen and Terrell, 1983: 16)

... language learning is essentially
learning how grammar functions in the achievement of meaning and it
is a mistake to suppose otherwise. .... A communicative approach
does not involve the rejection of grammar. On the contrary, it
involves a recognition of its central mediating role in the use of
and learning of language.(Widdowson, 1990: 97/8)

Where do you stand?

Presumably, if your interest is in developing the ways you teach
grammar, you are in Widdowson's camp. If you were asked why you
think teaching grammar is important, what would be your response?
There are 9 reasons (taken from Swan in Richards and Renandya, 2002)
here. Swan cites 7 bad and 2 good reasons for teaching grammar.
Can you identify them? Then click on the
to reveal some quotations from Swan's article.

Because it's
there

The grammar points in the course
book may not all be equally important for a particular class. It is important to choose grammar points relevant to our students’ needs, rather than blindly going through the syllabus from left to right.

It’s tidy

Grammar can be presented as a limited series of tidy things which students can learn, apply in exercises, and tick off one by one. Learning grammar is a lot simpler than learning a language.

It’s testable

It is time-consuming and difficult to design and administer tests which really measure overall progress and attainment. On the other hand, grammar tests are relatively simple. So grammar is often used as a
testing short-cut; and, because of the washback effect of testing, this adds to
the pressure to teach it. So we can easily end up just teaching what can be
tested (mostly grammar), and testing what we have taught (mostly grammar).

Grammar as a
security blanket

The ‘security-blanket’ aspect can lead students and their teachers to concentrate on grammar to the detriment of other less codifiable but equally important aspects of the language.

It formed my
character

Many foreign-language teachers spent a good deal of time when younger
learning about tense and aspect, the use of articles, relative clauses and the
like; they naturally feel that these things matter a good deal and must be
incorporated in their own teaching. In this way, the tendency of an earlier
generation to overvalue grammar can be perpetuated.

You have to
teach the whole system

People often regard grammar as a single interconnected system, all of which has to be learnt if it is to work properly. This is an illusion. Grammar is not
something like a car engine, where a fault in one component such as the ignition
or fuel supply can cause a complete breakdown. It is more realistic to regard grammar as an accumulation of different elements.

It empowers me

A teacher may have a worse accent than
some of her students; there may be some irritating child in the class with a
vast vocabulary of pop-music idiom or IT terminology of which the teacher knows
nothing; but there is always grammar to fall back on, with its complicated rules
and arcane terminology.

You need
grammar to communicate

Knowing how to build and use certain structures makes
it possible to communicate common types of meaning successfully. Without these
structures, it is difficult to make comprehensible sentences. We must,
therefore, try to identify these structures and teach them well.

Grammatical
accuracy is often required

In some social contexts, serious deviance from
native-speaker norms can hinder integration and excite prejudice – a person who
speaks ‘badly’ may not be taken seriously, or may be considered uneducated or
stupid. Students may, therefore, want or need a higher level of grammatical
correctness than is required for mere comprehensibility.

Swan's contention is that the first seven in this list are bad reasons
for teaching grammar but the last two are justifiable positions.
Like Widdowson, he asserts that grammar is part of communicative
competence (and, in fact, that this competence cannot be achieved without
grammatical competence) and that our students will often be in a
position where the accuracy of their grammar will be judged, regardless
of communicative effect.
For the full reasons why Swan judges the other seven to be poor reasons for
teaching grammar, go to
his website.

Right, now we know why we teach grammar (and some reasons why we
shouldn't) we can get on to improving how we do it. Click on any
of these statements for more: